Thanks for playing our game and this extensive feedback! Glad you liked it!
I agree the theme is a bit loose here. The main idea was that the staff is not working correctly and you go out and try to show your worthiness to make the staff working correctly. (like Excalibur, only in the right hands it can be handled). Unfortunately we had to cut a lot of content and polishing things up which ended up in cuts. Same applies to the combat itself. We had more animations and vfx ready but we ran out of time to implement it.